I will compare them based on 5 main parameters: Convenience, Design, Interface, Opportunities, Security, Profitability, and then summarize.

Conclusion

If you want to start farming in the TON network, it is better to do it on STON.fi by providing liquidity in pools with farming. Tonnel will be suitable only if you plan to hold those NFT-gifts that can be staked for a long time.

What is Impermanent loss?

Impermanent losses (IL) are losses associated with the change in value of assets invested in the liquidity pool compared to holding those assets outside the pool. To calculate IL you must calculate how much money you would have had if you had not put it in the liquidity pool, but just held it in your wallet.

Occurrence of Impermanent losses

Let's consider the example of trading pair NOT/TON, so the impermanent loss will occur if:

•TON grows and NOT falls and conversely.
•TON grows and NOT remains at the same level and conversely.
• TON falls and NOT stays at the same level and conversely.

The following follows: You, as an LP, want the assets in the pool to not change their price. Where can we observe this? That's right, in pools with two stablecoins, and so we move smoothly to the first point.

1. Provide liquidity to the Stableswap pools.

Indeed, there are liquidity pools where both assets are tied to a fixed price tag (USD). And don't just think about USDT and USDC. There are many stablecoins on different blockchains. For example, STON.fi, the largest DEX on the TON blockchain, has a relatively recent pool of AquaUSD/USD₮. However, there is a significant downside to this method. As a rule, such pools are very popular among LPs, and as a consequence, low APR due to high TVL. Therefore, such liquidity pools should be considered only as a long-term investment.

2. Provide liquidity to pools with different ratios.

There are liquidity pools where the token ratio is not 50/50. Sometimes platforms adjust this ratio to minimize risks for liquidity providers. After all, if you put liquidity in a pool with a 98/02 ratio, and the price of a token with a smaller portion changes, you will hardly feel such a loss. Moreover, there are pools where the ratio changes right on the fly, but personally I have not yet encountered such platforms.

3. Provide liquidity to pools with farming

Some DEXs offer users additional rewards in tokens for provding liquidity, also called farming, and pools with such rewards are called farms. So, these extra rewards can make up for your losses. You may notice a lot of farms on STON.fi, let's take a look at a few of the current ones:

JETTON/TON - 46.32% farm APR. Reward distribution: $220.66 / day (in JETTON tokens)
MY/TON - 86.33% farm APR. Reward distribution: $455 / day (in STON tokens)
AIC/USDT - 632% farm APR. Reward distribution: $2840 / day (in STON tokens)
To participate in farming, you need:

1. Go to the STON.fi website

2. In the “Pools” tab, sort the liquidity pools for the presence of Farming and select the pool you need by clicking on it.

3. Click "Add liquidity"

4. Provide liquidity in a bear market

When the price of tokens in the liquidity pool falls for a long time, the trend is likely to change and the price will go up, so providing liquidity on a drawdown is a great idea. But then you would have the question, “can't the coins go up in an even ratio?”
Yes, you're right, but even if you suffer impermanent losses on the upside, it's better than suffering impermanent losses on the downside. This method works more as an additional, rather than primary reason to provide liquidity. It can add to your confidence, but it is a mistake to be guided by it alone.

5. Avoid highly volatile assets

The final piece of advice may sound trivial, but it is worth mentioning. As an LP, you should avoid any highly volatile pairs, as they pose the greatest risk to you. These include coins that have been listed recently and coins with low liquidity. On STON.fi there is an exclamation mark icon next to such pools, warning the user about the possible risk of impermanent loss. Pools with these coins may have a very high APR, but the risk increases with the APR - just ignore such liquidity pools.

6. Bonus

Recently STON.fi announced the Impermanent Loss Protection feature, which works only in the STON/USDT V2 liquidity pool. The protection works automatically and compensates up to 5.72% Impermanent losses, which corresponds to a 50% decrease in the asset price. At the moment the function is disabled and expired, but we can hope for an extension. Stay tuned.

Conclusion

Let's summarize all of the above, but from the perspective of a bad LP. So, if you want to be affected by volatile losses, you need to:

1. Ignore liquidity pools with two stablecoins
2. Ignore liquidity pools with different ratios
3. Ignore farming on STON.fi
4. Provide liquidity only in a bull market
5. Provide liquidity onlu in highly volatile trading pair.

Learn more:
★★ Impermanent loss | STON.fi: The Ultimate Guide
★ What is liquidity pool | STON.fi: The Ultimate Guide

Liquidity providers are needed so that the pool's supply of tokens does not run out. In our example, these are the people on whose USDT we get our TONs. They provide liquidity to the pool. And now the tokens from the pool are available for exchange to DEX, which in turn rewards the liquidity providers with a portion of the fees from each transaction made within the pool to which the liquidity was provided.

Being a liquidity provider is a way to earn passive income, but you should be very careful when choosing a pool. Tokens in the pool should be relevant and promising, so that they have as much volume as possible and, as a consequence, a high APR (Annual Percentage Rate). Moreover, it is worth considering the TVL (Total Value Locked). It shows how many competitors you have that share the commission revenue with you. The lower the TVL, the higher the APR.

In the case of STON.fi, a leading DEX on the TON blockchain, we have farming APR in addition to the usual metrics.

What is Farming on STON.fi?

In short, farming is when a liquidity provider (LP) receives additional rewards in tokens for providing liquidity. Projects whose tokens are traded on DEX are interested in having more funds in their liquidity pools so that users can trade in larger volumes. Therefore, the project allocates rewards to the liquidity pool to attract providers.
For example, right now in MY/TON liquidity pool reward distribution is $494 in $STON tokens per day. Farming APR in this pool is 100%, while the normal 24h APR based on classic metrics is 25.12%.

Here are some current liquidity pools with active farming:
• JETTON/USDT: 45% APR
• MY/TON: 118% APR
• PONCH/TON: 214% APR

What are Impermanent Losses?

An impermanent loss occurs when you contribute cryptocurrency to a liquidity pool and the price of deposited tokens changes since the time of deposit. The larger the change, the larger the impermanent loss: in other words, when you withdraw, you will receive less in dollars than you deposited. Such losses occur if the prices of two assets in the liquidity pool are very different. To make it even easier to understand this concept, let me give an example. You have 1 coin with a price of $1000. You give it to a platform that pays you 10% year APR. Thus, if it wasn't for the volatile losses, you would have $1,100 after one year. However, the price of the сoin suddenly halves and you are left with only $550.

Absolutely any difference in the price of tokens in liquidity pools leads to impermanent loss, whether they are a rise or a fall. But the difference between rise and fall is that you lose potential money on the rise, i.e. if you were holding the token and not investing in a liquidity pool, you would have made a profit on the rise. This is why one of the safest ways to provide liquidity is to provide liquidity to Stableswap pools (pools with stablecoins). So you, as a liquidity provider, want the coins to be at roughly the same level, or both rising. And this is a very unpleasant problem, because it is not always possible to predict such drastic changes in the price of tokens.

So what's the solution?

Recently, STON.fi has introduced a new function of protection against impermanent losses. It works automatically (no claims are needed) when providing liquidity to the STON/TON pool and, in case of impermanent losses, compensates losses in $STON tokens up to 5.72% of impermanent losses. (corresponding to a ~50% decrease in asset price). Monthly protection budget is limited to $10,000, but maximum payout per user is $100 (in STON tokens). It is only available in the STON/TON pool.

You can learn more here.

Conclusion

STON.fi makes us happy with its bold innovations. Every time new farming pools appear, old ones are extended or expired, which gives its dynamics and allows liquidity providers to choose the liquidity pool more carefully for liquidity delivery. As for the protection against impermanent losses - it does give us confidence and allows us not to fear for our funds, but only in the STON/TON liquidity pool. I hope this feature will be the same for other liquidity pools in the future.

Just like farming, the impermanent loss protection feature attracts new liquidity providers. This is beneficial for the projects whose tokens are in the pool, which means that we may well expect STON.fi to cooperate with these projects. And then our ability to provide liquidity will expand significantly: another important factor in selecting the right pool will be added. But this is just speculation for now, don't take it seriously (or not?).

Purposes

Yes, these DEXs have different purposes. If STON.fi is a traditional DEX for swaps and liquidity providing, then StormTrade is a margin trading not only with cryptocurrency, but also with other assets. Here you can trade futures and even XAU/USD (Gold). But even in spite of its functionality, StormTrade is also a DEX on the TON blockchain, and therefore we have the right to compare them.

Metrics

TVL (Total Value Locked):
StormTrade - $15M
STON.fi - $148M

UAW (Unique Active Wallets):
StormTrade - $62K
STON.fi - $353K

ATV (All Time Volume):
StormTrade - $2B
STON.fi - $6.9B

Interface and design

I think the three color rule is a very important part of design, but the StormTrade website simply ignores it. Here we see combinations of fillet, green, blue, yellow, white and black. This means that there is no unified style. What can't be said about STON.fi: everything is designed in soft blue accent colors and pleases the eye. The interface of both DEXes is easy to use, but personally I think that STON.fi is more intuitive. Perhaps this is due to the abundance of functions on StormTrade, but we will talk about them later.

APR Comparison

Liquidity pools on StormTrade are hidden in the Earn tab, and here we are presented with a limited number of pools: USDT, TON, NOT. Let's compare their APR over 7 days with their counterparts on STON.fi.

USDT:
StormTrade - 20%
STON.fi - 30% (AquaUSD/USDŦ Stableswap pool)

TON:
StormTrade - 15%
STON.fi - 26%

NOT:
StormTrade - 15%
STON.fi - 15%
STON.fi - 40%

As we can see, STON.fi wins here for all pools. But why? The thing is that I calculated the total APR, which includes farming APR and regular APR.

What is farming on STON.fi?
Projects whose tokens are traded on DEX are interested in having more funds in their liquidity pools so that users can trade in larger volumes. Therefore, the project allocates rewards to the liquidity pool to attract providers. For example, right now in Stableswap pool AquaUSD/USDŦ Reward Distribution is 280$ per day:
STON: 33/day
AquaXP: 5,333,333/day.
and Farm APR is then equal to 29%.

There are actually a lot of liquidity pools on STON.fi, and a lot of farming pools. Stay tuned so you don't miss out on profitable pools.

Functionality and features

Now we will talk about the interesting details of both DEX, those very interesting “killer-features”.

STON.fi: if you select any two tokens in the “Swap” tab, the Trust Score from DYOR.io will appear near the coin you want to swap. Interesting and useful.

StormTrade: available as a Telegram-bot.

STON.fi: develops its own Omniston Protocol, which provides the best rate among all liquidity sources with zero slippage. You can learn more about what Omniston is here.

StormTrade: Here are some interesting Tournaments with rewards in $STORM tokens under the “Rewards” tab

STON.fi: Integrated with many projects like Tonkeeper, TonTradingBot, TapSwap, Dune, Tobi, etc.

Conclusion

Which DEX should you choose? If you need support for multiple assets, not only crypto, but also margin trading with leverage, you should look at StormTrade.
And if you need swaps and liquidity providing in the TON network, then STON.fi is your choice.

The two leading DEXs on the TON blockchain, STON.fi and DeDust, will be compared in several categories, but let’s start by looking at the numbers.

Metrics:

• TVL (Total Value Locked):
  STON.fi — $148M
  DeDust — $88M
• UAW (Unique Active Wallets):
  STON.fi — 353K
  DeDust — 118K
• ATV (All Time Volume):
  STON.fi — $6.9B
  DeDust — $2.2B

However, it’s silly to compare the two DEXs based on dry stats alone. So let’s move on to the next point.

User-interface and design

STON.fi impresses the user with its user-friendly interface, which is very intuitive and understandable for a beginner. Also, there are a lot of hints and guides on the site. For example, if you hover your cursor over the characteristic “i” icon next to a term, the site will explain the essence of that term to you. Convenient. Stylistically, everything is done in soft blue accent colors, while DeDust’s main color is orange. However, when using DeDust, I didn’t notice as much depth and usability as STON.fi. The interface feels a bit clumsy or something. Moreover, some users complain about the lack of token icons in the mobile version of the site, which makes it difficult to use DEX. So here STON.fi deserves the score.

Functionality and features

Now we will talk about interesting features of both platforms. The very little things that build usability.

STON.fi: if you select any two tokens in the “Swap” tab, the Trust Score from DYOR.io will appear near the coin you want to swap. Interesting and useful.
DeDust.io: There is a sorting of liquidity pools by the tokens they contain: $TON, $USDT and the $DUST project token.
STON.fi: There are a lot of farming sites that offer rewards to the user for supplying liquidity to the pool, while on DeDust there are far fewer of them.
DeDust.io: Here you can literally “boost liquidity” by adding rewards to the pool yourself to increase the liquidity of the suppliers that join. Similar to the principle of farming on STON.fi, however here the rewards can be added by any user.

Future plans

STON.fi plans to actively develop cross-chain technology between TON and other blockchains. The first on their list is Tron (by the way, a test swap has already been conducted), and in the future new ones will be added, including different EVM networks such as ETH, BNB, AVAX.

Moreover, STON.fi is developing Omniston Protocol, which provides the best rate among all liquidity sources with zero slippage. You can learn more about what Omniston is here.

Unlike STON.fi Whitepaper, DeDust’s Whitepaper is rather empty and does not tell about the project’s future plans.

Conclusion

Based on my personal experience, I can say that STON.fi is ahead of DeDust not only in Metrics, but also in all other parameters. It is more convenient to use DEX, the conditions are more favorable, because STON.fi offers you zero commission and minimal slippage, as well as many farming programs.